Southeast Asia Studies Seminar Program The MacMillan Center at Yale University Abstract Feb 21, 2007 This talk co-sponsored by International Security Studies at Yale

"Is Iraq Another Vietnam?"
Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, Vassar College

Is Iraq Another Vietnam? As American frustration with the war in Iraq grows, Robert Brigham tries to answer the question on everyone's mind, exploring the similarities between the controversial war in Iraq and the similarly disputed American campaign in Vietnam. While he discusses the crucial differences between the two, Brigham centers on four of their prevailing similarities: the rising justification of rebuilding a civil society out of the havoc of war; no political corollary to superior U.S. firepower; reliance on a clear and hold strategy; and declining public support.

Robert. K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, has taught at Vassar since 1994. He teaches courses on the history of American foreign relations and modern America.

Along with several teaching awards, Brigham has also earned fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, the Cooper Foundation, the Gilman Foundation, and the Social Sciences Committee in Hanoi, Vietnam. In addition, Brigham has been Albert Shaw Endowed Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, a Mellon Senior Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (Clare College), and was a visiting professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Brigham is author of numerous books and essays on American foreign relations, including Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Cornell, 1998); Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (PublicAffairs, 1999) written with Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight; ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Kansas, 2006); and Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (PublicAffairs, 2006). Brigham is currently working on a textbook on the Vietnam War with Mark P. Bradley (Oxford) and a political history of South Vietnam (Cambridge).

Brigham was the first American scholar given access to the Vietnamese archives on the war in Hanoi. Visit his website at http://vietnam.vassar.edu/

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